Inside the Tooty Fruity topless bar
the orange shag carpet shouts sock it to me.
Ed stands by the stage, drags on his cigar,
as he practices his spiel as emcee.

Backstage, the dancers have gathered around
the TV. Love American Style plays as they
all wait to go onstage. In the background,
the thump of bump and grind music. Match Game

is next. The flesh rebels buff french nails, puff
bouffant hairdos. A blond in a blanket
says that contestant is cute— kind of a rough
Peter O'Toole in a Nehru jacket.

Lawrence of Arabia with mustache,
a petite redhead laughs. Simply suicide,
that one. I bet he’s nothing but heartache.





This is a formally accomplished poem.  You will note it tracks virtually a sonnet form with rhyme until the last stanza where it goes one line over a sonnet’s 14.  The poem is very efficient at using the words given to the poet by the contest rules. 

I believe strength and weakness of any poet or poem is like the right-side-up and “reversed” meanings of a Tarot card.  The “bad” or “reversed” side is inevitably tied up in and related to the “good” side. This is a corollary to the unity of all things.  So, here, the strength of the poem is its severe objectivity — there is no subjective wishiwashiness of the speaker.  Instead all is objective, objects, seen things, outside, other things, other people, being described and evoked, as opposed to evoking the poet-speaker’s own interiority.  The related weakness (strength and weakness are always related) is that one does not have any deep swooping interior subjective movement or insight in the poem. 

One hungers for subjectivity in poems, in our time, because subjectivity is a textual tracing of our own selves, of how we feel about things, and we crave believable subjectivity in the poems we read because the self is on the verge of being destroyed in our society, it is under attack by the collapse of traditional religious models of reality and the rise of no real substitute beyond a sort of creeping nihilistic materialism.  But even though this spiritual mood is not overtly stated via subjective comment, it is indirectly keenly adumbrated by the poem in images such as the brilliantly sketched strip club milieu so firmly established by end of stanza 1; the very clever interpolation of the TV (as a skeleton on which to hang more of the words required to be used in this contest, as well as a nod toward postmodernity — backstage, the performers themselves watch a staged thing — levels of simulacra, materialized simulation, staging).  This is cool music:  “The flesh rebels buff French nails, puff. . .”  The poem is vigorously crafted. 

Acutely crafted evoked objects themselves can be subjective insight, since any object is really the perception of that object (“there are no things, only interpretations” – Nietzsche), and the perception, how the thing is seen, is itself a map of the interiority of the observer; see for example Elizabeth Bishop.
 

Initially Jack was supposed to judge the contest, but I went through the poems while he was at work and eliminated all but five I thought were strongest as an experiment to see if he would choose the same poems.  My final two were “Mirrors and Burnt Orange” and “Oranges”.

Without knowing my choices, Jack read and selected the poems he thought were strongest. It was interesting to find out our final selections were the exact same poems. At that point we began discussing five of the poems in length, their respective strengths and weaknesses. We extensively talked about craft, what was done with the chosen words as far as subject matter, persona, clarity of narrative or lyric and the emotional aspects of the poems.  I chose “Mirrors and Burnt Oranges” as a first place poem because the narrative was compelling and believable.  The craft of this poem impressed me. I didn’t even notice the rhymes until the second read, they were so subtle. The poem pays attention to sonics, but does so in a manner that isn’t apparently self-conscious.  Unlike Jack, I was relieved there was no epiphany in the poem. I felt the tone was consistently subjective and an epiphany would’ve been too contrived, too pat and convenient. Instead the poet chooses to refocus the poem in the final lines on how these dancers perceive characters, a slight irony occurs because the dancers backstage are “themselves” opposed to the personas they adopt on the floor. It’s easy to imagine their customers thinking and saying the same types of things about them while they’re performing, “That one is kinda cute,” or “She looks like a heartbreaker.”

Oranges
by Sharon Brogan

When one wakes in the night
despite sleeping pills, white
noise machines, orthopedic
pillows, and thinks of oranges

—such sweetness — there it is,
that orange, floating brilliantly
in this dim room — and all
the things one must make sense

of — Nehru jackets, bouffant
hairdos, threatening french
nails — your attachment to top-
less bars, those artificial orbs,

that tooty fruity booze — all
this demanding explication
in the swoony night with its
train whistles and sock-it-to-me

buzz, love, American style, the ed-
ification of this planet's turn to
darkness, the rebellious suicide
of the sun, the sweetness of

oranges — where is Lawrence
of Arabia when you need him
to peel this open, to hand you,
one-by-one, these white-veined

crescents, dripping with light?
 

This poem I like, first, because the form seems real, i.e. not old-fashioned, i.e. not horribly already boringly known.  It seems fresh, experimental.  I like the relatively same-length lines (as if linebreaks were by word processor default setting as opposed to authorial intent.  The form is fresher than the poem I discussed above.  The form feels informed by the technological changes in writing — i.e., internet, word processors, etc.  The form has a little of the stream of statement splay of an email.  Also I like the use of subordinate breaks within the lines, via the em-dash ( — ). 

Compared to the last poem I discussed, this one is much more interior, but with a slight slippage or loss of pure external clear acute objective description, as a result  (the strength/reversed aspects, again).  Now, “white-veined crescents” is a vivid image, all the better for being slightly surreal, slightly beyond the ken of the orange slices purportedly described — an image on its way to becoming a metaphor, as it were.  But, something like the immediately following “dripping with light” is, to me, a little too easy, as an evoked external seen-thing image.  The use of the trope “light” as a rhetorical enhancer along these lines is overdone, is a rhetorical cliché, at this point — because one sees it done so often in contemporary poetry.  Too many poets bring in “light” to sound profound.  The integration of the list of words from the contest, in the poem, is wonderfully done here.  You don’t get any sense of strain.  It’s like the poet wasn’t abiding by any mandatory word list, at all.  I also like the use of the repetition of “must make sense of” and “demanding explication” to keep the reader centered.  Interesting how both this poem and the one I discussed above choose to end with the Lawrence of Arabia image, which I think might relate to how the Lawrence image is a character image, evokes a human person, thus is more loaded than all the other words in the list, so, the poet uses the body of the poem to sort of work his/her way up to the level where Lawrence can be introduced.  Also, I like this poem because it makes a deep point:  the point of all this kitsch and seamy cultural stuff in secular materialist postmodern culture (the Nehru jackets, bouffs, booze, etc.) reveals itself to be tipped with a sort of scary spiritual vertigo or sadness, which is adeptly brought out by the poem with its smooth movements from concrete list of Nehru jackets, bouffs, booze, etc. on through to the abstraction of “planet’s turn to darkness” and “rebellious suicide of the sun” then the surprising (dream logic mimetic) “sweetness of oranges” – notice the structuring here, as a matter of syntax/grammar — the “turn” (like in a sonnet) that comes with “where is Lawrence. . .”  Very clever work.  I could give it undivided first place except for that dog-gone “dripping with light.”




The more I read this poem, the more I liked it. The poet used the chosen words in a list which was different than any of the other poems, it was an effective approach. There was no indication that the words were prompts for the poem. In many of the contest poems, I felt like the words were sticking out, too obvious. I love the juxtaposition of complete calm and anxiousness. It gives the poem this incredible tension and earns its transcendence.  I also loved the image, “white-veined crescents” — very sensual.

My Orange Year
by Birdie Jaworski

Twenty-three years ago
I breathed my identity the way middle teens do
wore sharp french nails
wrote suicide notes
like all my friends, just pine tree rebels

I know a darkness that's colder than cold
know Love American Style
remember my first lover Ed
called him Lawrence of Arabia, of my scrub suburb desert
with his Nehru Jacket, just a retro rebel

My mother stood at her mirror
hair teased into an orange bouffant hairdo
Sock it to me, she said
Tell me why you snuck outta that topless bar
Mom, you're a tooty fruiti woman, but me, I'm a rebel.

Love that second line.  To me, a brilliant existential apercu:  “I breathed my identity the way middle teens do.”  Since middle teens are indeed swirling with personality change and searching for an identity like trying on masks that gradually melt into faces.  I also love “scrub suburb desert” — the sound play.  Also the weird evocativeness of “pine tree rebels” giving off to “colder than cold.”  The poem’s also very efficient.  Look how tiny it is compared to the others, and it still manages to deploy all the list words.  My advice to this poet would be find a way to write so every line is as POW amazing as the chunks I quoted.  Honestly I went back and forth between giving this one first place.  In the end I felt like it had a slight slippage or weakening at the end, probably due to the need of having to use up the remaining list words while still making sense.  A short poem like this has got to have a powerful ending, or an ending with a strange weakness that tears a hole in the reader making them feel like they are leaking into infinity.




I loved the voice in this poem: honest, direct, whimsical, not a hint of being self-conscious. The title maybe could help bring this poem up another level. I felt this comparison between the speaker and her mother was more important, given that in the first line we are told it happened twenty three years ago. I kept wanting to know if the speaker still felt this way, was she still a rebel, unlike her mother? Or had time polished that abrasive personality?

Matching Orange Slacks
by Jack McGeehin

The poem is very effective at using the framework of a character portrayal to hang all the list words on.  The opening is probably a little too long (“He had” through “angry”).  Also, the ending is weak, like the poet ran out of gas and did some pseudo-Bukowski riffage to wrap up the poem.  The trouble is that for the bulk of the poem the speaker is shown to be sensitive and compassionate and deep — then you got this one-liner at the ending that is totally out of character — “The bastard owed me six months rent.”  I don’t buy that the speaker would really say that, because it is cruder/more vulgar than the way the speaker presents elsewhere.  The ending seems weak therefore.  This is great:

“He only drank orange juice
from Florida
and vodka from your
liquor cabinet.”

And, “ice-cream piled high” is great.  But my advice would be to get more sharpness in the beginning and ending.  It has to be a poem not a story —  i.e. it needs more compression, what Pound called, “condensare.”




This poem has wonderful moments, perhaps the most wonderful moments out of all the poems, but the beginning had me saying, “Hmmmm…” and the close left me cold. I loved the persona of the speaker, very observant, witty, charming, humorous, but the voice in the close of the poem was like a Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde. I came to like the speaker so much that I just couldn’t believe the cold detachment in the final lines, but what a wonderful persona in the middle of the poem — very, very, likeable.
 

Orange Days/Blue Dreams
by Pris Campbell

He lives his life in retro,
a platter spinning backwards,
still whining, 'Paul is dead'.
Carefully selected hookers
with bouffant hairdos and
day-glo french nails, scream
'sock it to me, babe' til he peaks,
per written instructions
inside the enveloped cash.

When broke, he digs out his Nehru jacket,
watches tapes of Sullivan, Mr. Ed,
anything old by Travolta, but
Love American Style claims his heart.
He rebels against modern TV, claims it only
promotes our already tooty fruity vision
of real-time reality.

His ex works in a topless bar,
aging boobs siliconed into twin peaks,
calls him when she contemplates suicide,
reminds him she once looked like Stevie Nicks.

Sometimes he reads her his poetry,
remembers the days they rode each other raw,
then drove out to Coney Island,
to giggle at old ladies in swim suits
and bare pale legs to the sun.

His words bring back the rainbows briefly.
He watches Lawrence of Arabia all night;
imagines himself galloping through hot sands,
robe flying, a hero to all women, celluloided
in time,the man they'll never forget.

The first stanza seems weak to me, as does the second.   From “He lives his life in retro” to “”the enveloped cash” sort of obscures the figure and reveals little emotional tone.  Then beginning at “When broke,” BAM, you got some great emotional guilt revealment and corresponding particulars.  Some real, honestly felt and shown sadness, guilt, shown here. The language comes to life sharper.  The “Stevie Nicks” stanza is acridly powerful.  The “old ladies” stanza builds.